toshair's Techdirt Profile

toshair

About toshair

toshair's Comments comment rss

  • Feb 05, 2010 @ 06:08am

    Re: Re: Sabre

    You stated: "Jet Blue's mistake was building a ticketing system just for themselves, when they should have approached it with a few additional strong partners."

    I pointed out that JetBlue did not build "a ticketing system just for themselves" as you asserted. They migrated to the Sabre Interact system which was not built or created just for JetBlue but a re-hash of the 60+ year old Sabre Native command-line platform that Sabre Holdings Corporation is trying to peddle to other airlines to replace the earnings and market share they are losing with the exit of American Airlines.

  • Feb 04, 2010 @ 08:48pm

    Sabre

    Jack - Sabre is not a system developed just for or by JetBlue. Sabre was originally developed by American Airlines over 60 years ago. AA is actually developing a new reservations system with EDS to REPLACE Sabre.

    The NEW system - and that is really a misnomer - is based on a 60+ year old command-line program. Sabre has attempted to put a GUI on the front-end and it has been a dismal failure. The interface still must mesh and follow the same commands used in the old program, as a result, the program is NOT intuitive and is difficult to learn. Various operations are now much more complicated - for instance, rebooking a ticket is 6-steps, repricing a ticket is 11-steps, an exchange is now 35-steps and a refund-reissue requires a whopping 74-steps... YES, 74-STEPS!! No wonder there are extremely long hold times to reach a JetBlue agent! Don't blame those on the phone, blame Sabre!

    Roger is correct - two conversions to Sabre and nothing but problems. Sabre blamed all of the problems on WestJet when time, and now the issues with JetBlue, clearly show that the issues and blame clearly lay with Sabre. I read yesterday that Sabre is now going to pay WestJet "compensation." I hope JetBlue also pushes for compensation.

    The issues at WestJet clearly showed the flaws with Sabre's Interact program. Unfortunately, I believe that JetBlue was too far along the path to turn back. I think that JetBlue will ultimately survive this customer service nightmare, it's just really sad that Sabre has screwed them over just like they did WestJet.